Um no lol the post was made in jest. Whilst i do believe that from what my ears tell me that cables do make changes to sound around £5 per metre is about the absolute maximum i would consider parting with.
It's shocking that companies can market products like this and keep a straight face nothing justifies charging this amount for " a piece of wire " .
I had a friend who owned an Amstrad computer back in the '80s, but I had no idea they also made audio gear. I wonder how long it took those cigarette ashes to work their way into that genuine simulated wood veneer cabinet? 😛
I've wondered for a while: how does an engineer feel after sweating the details of a good amp design, parts to performance and reliability balanced with cost, making it look good while not pricing it beyond its targeted customer base,taking into account the time and cost of being educated to such a level of design competence, only to see a piece of wire being sold for several hundreds, to thousands of dollars.
Perhaps thinking education is the means to generating wealth is a form of snake oil : )
As i'm sure most would agree that there is a limit to the performance that can be achieved regardless of cost.
Yet much "high end" is priced far above the actual cost of production even taking research and development etc into account.Leaving aside the few individuals that do genuinely believe that a cable costing 100 k plus sounds superior to one costing £100 i guess the market is geared towards those to whom money is no object and products like this are a just a visual indication of their wealth purchased to impress each other.
Some years ago, I went to a local school library that was selling off some of their older books to make room for new ones. On the pile of rejects was a mathematics textbook - a compendium of the greatest works of thousands of years worth of human genius. The sticker on it said 50 cents.
An utterly useless pink rubber sheath for your iPhone, meanwhile, goes for $50: iPhone 6s Plus Silicone Case - Light Pink - Apple (CA)
Education is not a reliable means to becoming a one-percenter. For that, you have to be lucky, be in the right place at the right time, born of the right parents, and it helps to be a psychopath.
But statistically, education does make a huge difference to your lifetime earnings. Last time I looked at US Federal education statistics, the median lifetime earnings of a person with a professional degree was found to be around 4.4 million dollars, while the median lifetime earnings of a person with only a high-school education was around 1.2 million dollars. So that professional degree was, in fact, adding over three million dollars to the median person's lifetime earnings. Three million bucks is nothing to sneeze at!
While the financial payoff from getting an education is huge, the personal payoff is incalculable. Who wants to go through life being ignorant? Who wants to be an easy victim to every conman, because you don't know enough about logic or reason to question the con? Who wants to be shut out of all the interesting jobs? Who wants to be unable to understand anything about how this wonderfully complex world of ours works?
-Gnobuddy
You often have to buy pieces of wire that cost that much as an engineer for your test equipment but that is for guaranteed and calibrated performance almost DC to daylight. Engineers are also often fond of things machined from solid. As for the cables, at least for me its no worse than the ads for any over priced tat, from magic shampoo to cars that apparantly not only make you a better driver, but make every woman in 100m radius find you sexy. Marketing is full of it.
Quality costs. Hucksters exist. Such is life 🙂
But at least we are here to poke them with a stick....
... a very special, expensive stick, of course! 😀
Wow - where do I begin?
I personally know of one person who was 1) born of the "right people", 2) in the "right place", 3) received an Ivy-League PhD, and 4) is a complete sociopath. This winning combination produced a person whose "business plan" is running a biotech startup for the sole purpose of skimming off public grant money. Now *that's* snake-oil!
Ultimately, the value of an education is determined by who is doing the 'valuing'. IME, education is valued least by those who are the most obstinately ignorant and afraid, the most by those who seek to understand and use their knowledge for the common good. As one who earned a degree later in life, the value for me lay in the intangibles: self-respect, personal achievement, and an opportunity to mentor my fellow students. But I'd be lying if I didn't admit that the money's nice, too.
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Swap ivy league for Eton and Oxbridge, and you just described the ruling layer of UK society...
I honestly don't remember the exact book any more, but it was along the line of Mary Boas' wonderful undergrad math textbook ("Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences"), containing chapters on everything from vectors and matrices to derivatives, series,integrals,and differential equations.
All of which has been entirely typical undergrad math for many decades now, but there isn't a single topic there that didn't take extraordinary genius to come up with in the first place.
I sometimes think about the fact that I couldn't even invent a way to tie my own shoelaces - like just about every child, someone had to show me how. Once you've seen the concept and learned how to tie one type of knot, many of us can invent another (though usually it will already have been invented.) But who was the genius who invented the first knot, and passed it on to millions or billions of descendants?
It's a sobering thought, that if humanity had been depending on me for the ideas that collectively make human civilization possible, they wouldn't even have a way to tie their shoelaces! 😀
(And let's not even talk about the shoes!)
-Gnobuddy
That's a really interesting observation! Especially the second half, which isn't at all obvious. But now that you've laid it out, I believe you're absolutely right - that certainly agrees with my personal experiences.
I was really intrigued (and moved) by the concept of open-source software when I first heard about it. There's an excellent example of what you're talking about: tens of thousands of smart people, usually educated, who use their intelligence and education to create something useful, and give it away to the world. No snake-oil there, and that lack of snake-oil is the biggest thing that's held open-source software back from wider public acceptance...we've collectively been taught that nothing is good unless it's expensive, by people who have a deep and personal interest in getting us to open our wallets wide.
-Gnobuddy
I once saw a documentary on Japan's snow monkeys - those charming little primates that survive the bitter cold and snow by soaking in the natural hot springs in the area.
I've seen other footage of snow monkeys, but this documentary was different for one reason: at one point, the camera turns away from the monkeys lolling relaxedly in the warm water.
That's when you realise that most of the monkeys in the tribe are, in fact, not in the warm water, but rather, are standing around in the freezing cold, bare feet in the snow, shivering and looking utterly miserable.
It turns out that the hot springs are only for the aristocrats in the tribe: the monkeys born to the "right people". Everyone else is kept out, to shiver, shudder, and maybe freeze to death.
It's not a question of limited resources - there is plenty of room for the entire tribe in the warm water. But only the high-status aristocrats are allowed in, and any members of the proletariat who attempt to crawl into the life-giving warmth of the pool will be viciously attacked by the aristocrats for having the temerity to try.
Seeing this, I realized that the problem of a greedy, self-obsessed, cruel, ruling class isn't just American, or British, or human. It's a primate problem, and goes back to the way primate brains and primate society evolved over the course of millions of years.
Our evolutionary history has let us down, and the social mechanisms that once maintained stability in a small pack, now allow the majority of us to be exploited ruthlessly by the one-percenters.
-Gnobuddy
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